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Bravo enters Baghdad and set up an HQ in a cigarette factory, where Brad finds out that Kocher and his team are being demoted and censured for the Captain America situation last week. You know, when he went crazy that one time? And they pulled him off that Iraqi guy he was abusing, and then the random guy decided they were war criminals? So now he's fine, they're screwed -- and yet he still manages to present himself as this Rodney Dangerfield victim of chance and circumstance, such is the balls-out nature of his craziness.
Evan sees his first combat jack and runs in an evasive manner, Lilley's wife joins the Marines and Jacks's wife leaves him, but otherwise Baghdad is not that interesting. They're only patrolling once every three days for a while, but then the orders start changing every five seconds and not making sense. A team of the least appealing Bravo Marines, including Chaffin and Jacks, are stymied in their loot attempts, but luckily are able to use their Recon skills effectively, and destroy some random exec's office somewhere for no real reason other than they're gross.
All the men in Baghdad ask Ray and Doc Bryan for valium, treat children horribly, try to put up giant statues of Bush, and try to fuck Gabe. The moral of the story is, I think, Baghdad would be awesome without all the people in it. Luckily, we're there to kill them all. Nate at first gets pulled into humanitarian shit just like he always knew he would, and is of course deterred by Encino Man -- but the second Baghdad becomes one giant firefight, Encino Man orders Bravo Two on patrol despite having no idea what he's talking about. Nate says no, he isn't getting his men blown up for no reason in the middle of the night, and Encino Man is just like so offended.
Brad starts a campaign to blow up unexploded ordnance -- including a bomb in a garden where little kids play, okay -- and Nate stops him after the first one. Then Battalion orders Patterson to accompany some engineers to mark a mine field at night. Since there's no reason to do that whatsoever, unless you're trying to get people killed, Patterson tells Encino Man to go fuck himself. Hilariously, he immediately runs whining to Captain America and makes him do it instead. Long story short: two casualties, casevaced to nowhere, following a shortcut Cap made up.
Evan says goodbye to the boys -- including a Ripped Fuel-free Ray, who is quiet and even scarier than usual -- and gets some bullshit speech from Ferrando about how the best policy is to ignore all complaints about your men until such time as people die. Which is retarded, but not as retarded as the example he gives Evan, which is that Nate Fucking Fick of all people has a terrible track record, so you see how this makes logical sense. Evan is of course grossed out, and then even more grossed out when Ferrando starts talking about how he gets off on being shot at.
They play football in a soccer field, because what you need with real attack dog aggression is more, pretend aggression on top of it. Encino Man screams his idiot head off, because he thinks football is God, and generally acts like a prick until Patterson finally beats the shit out of him, awesomely. On an unrelated but nearly simultaneous note, Ray freaks out and gets his ass handed to him by Rudy, which hurts both their feelings.
Everybody says as many meaningful things about the war and being Marines as they can, in very somber voices. Normally I would say this is a screenwriting issue, but it comes off as powerfully real because if you've been watching at all, you know to what degree these guys are drama queens. I have to say, though, that the last scene of the series is completely awesome: Bravo Two, watching Lilley's footage while Johnny Cash plays, and one by one getting bored with it, until all that's left is Trombley, watching himself kill. Well done.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Ray pisses in the dust while Brad and Nate and Gunny Wynn look out over the city. "Jesus Christ," Brad breathes. "That's a lot of city." Wynn says if they're not careful, they'll get lost in there. On Brad's Blue Force Tracker, Nate sees it in two dimensions: "Street after street, alley after alley. Look at it." And compared to those little kilometer long towns in their tracks, Wynn notes, it's a different world. There's Fedayeen sniping American units down in the city, as they watch. Nate points Brad to a specific neighborhood, a Shi'a slum called Saddam City. Wynn notes the need to rename that bitch, and they all smile. Everybody mounts up to head in, and Brad quietly signals Ray over to the truck. "Dude, check it out! I wrote USA with my piss!" So noted. Brad grins to himself.
Trombley's up top on the way in. Walt is driving, and Ray is asleep, having finally crashed. He spends this entire episode crashing and crashing, digging more places to crash underneath where he crashed, and then crashing again. Brad starts singing "King Of The Road," because that's how he's feeling: lofty and magnanimous. A man of means, by no means. Somebody calls for Eric Kocher over the radio, and receives the response that he is no longer on Three Two. Say again? "Be advised: the team leader's been fired. Over." For once, the radios are working, so Brad can't get more info. Ray wakes up and asks about Kocher. "He's not riding with Three Two," Brad says darkly. Ray shakes the sleep from his head: "...Were you guys singing 'King Of The Road' without me?"
The trucks head into a warehouse, where Marines are scattering bits of silver paper everywhere, in celebration. One man dances underneath them; somebody else asks him to show his tits. They're encamping in a cigarette factory. It's burning because the entire city is burning. "If these were Marlboros, we'd be fuckin' rich." Chaffin compares smoking "hajji cigarettes" to "eating raghead pussy," because he's really interesting as a person and has super high self-esteem. Ray points out they're standing in the biggest cloud of secondhand smoke possible ever: "They fuckin' execute people for shit like this in California," he says.
It would be a lot funnier if James Ransone hadn't once again decided against acting in this half of the episode. Hey, it's a choice. And frankly drugged into a coma he could still act circles around Jon Huertas, who manages to fuck up every scene he is in this episode twice as bad as usual, which is not even really his fault because of the Poke speeches being shoveled into his mouth at twice their normal rate by some kind of expert bullshit stevedores with zero sense of normal speech rhythms, who still think it's tearjerking shit when you spit it out as loudly and quickly as possible.
Outside, Rudy's asking Wynn what they're supposed to do once all the vehicles are staged: dig ranger graves? "Combat's over, Rudy. Besides, you can't dig through concrete." Brad goes looking for the story with Kocher and Redman, and Dirty tells him to ask them himself. "They're back with Motor T, Colbert." Brad is grossed out, but heads off to find them. He walks right past Captain America, who sits like a toad.
Brad finds them inside a building, doing maintenance. "Brad, how do you like my new MOS? I'm a fucking POG!" They listen to rap music; Redman says at least there's wonderful tunes. "It's gangsta back here with the POGs, dude." He explains why they're suddenly not Recon anymore: "Because of that EPW takedown, the one where Captain America was trying to get us to help bayonet the hajji." Brad knows. "He tries to stick the dude, we stop him, we get suspended." Eric nods grimly. It was the reservists that reported the unit. "Same First Sergeant who shook my hand and told me I saved his life when I pulled that EPW out of the bushes writes up a report saying we're all involved." So for trying to stop the Captain, they've become war criminals, full inquiry: "Godfather's on it personally." And for once, I don't mean Mattis's cock.
Brad asks why, then, would Captain America be right out front commanding the Platoon. "They relieved him," Eric explains. "For about twenty minutes. Reinstated him. Seems like officers don't like to suspend other officers." Now, yes, every single one of the people on the screen is trained and paid to brutalize people. "But our Captain, he's brutal to the wrong people." Brad promises to do whatever he can, which is a lot considering his own luck in having a Platoon commander who isn't a BSE case in trousers. Redman thanks him as he leaves; Eric just stares into space.
Brad, of course, runs straight into Captain America coming out. Which is to say that Captain America has been waiting this whole time for Brad to come back out so that he can kiss his ass and try once again to get anybody and everybody on his side, because he has no idea that his side is shit-crazy, because nobody knows when they're crazy or else they would cut that shit out. "Brad, you heard, didn't you? I'm not gonna stand for my men being fucked like this! My uncle's a full-bird Colonel at CENTCOM! And I'm contacting him! I'm hiring a lawyer! For all of us!" Brad's like, Oh are ya? "The important thing, Brad, is that Eric and Redman hang together! We don't want them talking on their own! Eric looks up to you! Let him know I gotta take the lead!" Man, the only thing grosser than Captain America freaking out is Captain America being sleazy and trying to work people.
"Sir, at the risk of speaking out of turn, it seems to me those men might not share the same interests as you. They're suspended? And you're not?" Captain America's all about how that's not his problem, and Brad takes off. He stops him with a hand to the chest, just in case Brad has somehow managed to evade his complex web of manipulation: "You know, the Marine Corps promised to watch our backs! They said that we would be held accountable to facts not as they are in hindsight but as they appeared to us at the time!" Like that's an answer: "I'm as dogshit crazy as I was yesterday! Therefore I have no responsibility or accountability for the fucked up Rambo shit I pulled yesterday!" Brad, disgusted, won't even meet his eyes.
"They told us that going in! And now they're hanging us out to dry!" And by "us" he means, "not me, ever," because he's an officer, and it's no skin off his ass to act like this is just so unfair for his men. His men, who are being held accountable for his own unacceptable actions. Raise a stink as big as the Ritz and nobody's going to worry about it: he's just doing the right thing, taking care of his unit. So actually Captain America, obviously, is doing a brilliant thing here, by running around and making noises, and in fact if you think about it he's always been doing the right thing by running around and making noises, because if nobody's allowed to talk then all you hear is noises, and all the noises he ever makes are, "I can't believe something awful has been done to me," even though nothing awful is ever actually done to him. Which is his entire personality anyway, so in a queasy and gross bureaucratic way, he actually is the best at his job, in that he was born naturally to run around not doing anything of use and trumpeting his own victimhood and kissing upstairs ass, because that's who gets ahead. The military is different from real life in lots of ways but this is not one of them.
In the warehouse, Nate explains their "mission" in Saddam City, Baghdad, to "include patrols that establish the American presence, stop the looting, and restore a sense of security in order to allow critical life-sustaining functions to take place. "Translation: shoot people. "The intent is to locate key facilities in our zones such as schools and hospitals," blow them up, "collect intelligence on Fedayeen and Ba'ath loyalists who are still at large," blow them up, "and to prevent lawlessness and disarm the populace" by shooting them.
"The end state is a humble competent force occupying this area, ensuring security and mutual trust between us and the local populace." Because that's something we have found so easy to accomplish in our own country. And by "we" I mean "people" and by "country" I mean "ever."
"We have rolled through this country fucking things up. And now we have to show these people what we liberated them for." I fucking dare you to make me a list. "Marines have been here for about 24 hours. They've set up on the other side of this warehouse. They've had one killed and one wounded from sniper and mortar fire, so keep your PPE on at all times." There's a gunshot, but don't worry: those people killing people aren't murdering them in their own city. They're good guys. "Those are Navy SEAL snipers set up on the top floor of the office tower. And judging from their rate of fire, dropping a bad guy every five or ten minutes." Give or take. "But compared to where we've been, I think it's pretty safe here." Relative, as usual. He's assured of this: "We should all get a good night's rest. That's it." Everybody gives a tired, broken-spirited hoo-rah.
At the main gate, a car blows the hell up. Ray: "Motherfuckers from One Five are lighting up the street like it's cool." Trombley wants to "go help them out," meaning to kill people, and Ray's frankly interested in that too. Nearby, Nate notices that the whole "good night's rest" thing was a fantasy in every way, and Gunny nods. A bullet lands at Evan's feet and he picks it up. Ray's kidding when he notes that getting shot means neither a Purple Heart nor disability if you're a civilian like Evan, and offscreen somebody lovely calls that a waste of a good bullet. So just to review: getting shot not only gives you a boner apparently, which I'm still confused about, but also you get paid. Still not seeing how that equals out. You can get both of those things pretty easily, provided somebody's paying your gay ass to watch a show about half-naked Marines. They're just jokes, folks. "This is definitely not good," Nate worries, as the gunfire intensifies; this helicopter in the sky goes in a very wrong direction, physics-wise, while either shooting or being shot or both, and Nate's like: "What did I just say, things? Go good!" Everybody goes running, except for Evan and Trombley, who are still sufficiently living in a movie of their own lives that they can enjoy the total war movie they're in the middle of.
Nighttime, Brad's promising Eric everybody in Bravo will stand up and testify as to Captain America's incompetence if so called upon. Eric smiles wryly: "He has a full bird uncle at CENTCOM, I'm sure he's mentioned it to you. There's nothing to be done, Brad. Just suck it up and smile." He takes off and Brad feels helpless, but it's like: there's things you can fix and things that you can't, and sometimes the latter things hit you on the head. The tragedy of Brad is his belief; the tragedy of Eric is the same.
Evan walks out to find a place to crap, and there's a guy on a shitbox who at first seems like he might be asleep, but soon it becomes apparent that he's anything but. Where's Lilley's gay porn cam when you need it? Evan does a double take at witnessing his first combat jack not involving humping the ground with Corporal Person, and jets. He comes down into a scary area, against a metal gate, like a subway in a movie before the creatures come. He watches one guy running past, firing a weapon, and then things get hairy enough that he backs off.
Q-Tip grins up at him from his rack: "Combat jack?" No, but funny you mention it. "I tried to shit. I was looking for a place, I ended up out by the front gate. People started shooting at each other." He lies down on the ground. "I think I heard an Iraqi get shot right in front of me." One of the guys quips, "Too bad. He probably would have liked democracy." He gets a laugh, but not as much as Chaffin, still firing out into the darkness, screaming at the enemy. Evan snuggles up tight to the gunfire, and watches the bombs over Baghdad.
Breaking dawn, and it's time for mail call. Maybe Ray will do another hilarious monologue. Because if not, this shit is going to be hella depressing. Chaffin's got a bunch of bills, Lilley's car just got repo'd, and Manimal's wife is divorcing him. "She wants to take my kids with her back to Reno." Maybe she saw last week's episode. Evan asks Espera if everything's okay on the homefront, and it is. That doesn't make it easier, but it is. Lilley's wife misses him so much she's going to join the Marines. I wouldn't do that even for Lilley. Maybe I would become a sparkly-skinned vampire and dump my werewolf boyfriend for Lilley, resulting in a demon baby with a retarded name taking chomps out of my spine or whatever, but not the Marines. He's hot, but nobody's that hot.
"She already signed the papers. The fuck?" Chaffin suggests, classy as ever, that perhaps she'll end up in Motor T and get "airtighted by three niggers," which would in the estimation of another fine fellow of our United States Marine Corps cause her to resemble a "fucking cumdragon." Like, Falkor? ...Whoa, Daddy's working blue tonight. That's hardly an appropriate image. I apologize. Manimal goes half as fucking nuts as he's going to, which is still way nuts, about how he would like to at this point call in some danger-close on his wife, and additionally fly some Cobras right up her fucking lawyer's ass. There's a whole sympathy thing I'm missing for Jacks's problems, because I've never been given a reason to give a fuck about him beyond his enormous mitts, which are impressive.
Off to the side, Wynn and Sixta note the dip in morale, because that's 90% of their jobs, and Sixta says in slightly less than his usual illiterate retardese, "If morale gets really bad, Mike, let me know. I'll stir 'em up good with the Grooming Standard," and winks again. Which, if you've not been really paying attention, might seem like some swooping reversal where everything makes sense, except Pappy already told us in like the first episode that -- much like the denial of basic shit serves to make Marines even crazier -- being a Sergeant Asshole is the job, but being an Asshole Regular Grade is different, and that Sixta, the coward of Khafi, excels at both. Which makes him precisely one-half of a badass, and he can still suck it. Wynn's like, "Yeah, I'll let you know."
So, Nate tells us, "This was apparently Uday and Qusay's cigarette factory. They exported twenty brands of cigarettes and made almost $50 million a year." (Insert silly meta joke about how Evan and Nate both wrote awesome books that you really should have read by now, if I haven't mentioned them quite enough yet.) Meanwhile, in the real fictional real fake real secret actual world, Iraqi guys are writing a book and they don't even have paper and the book says, "We need help. We need help. Please, stop the looting." This book is not very satisfying because as anybody knows, a narrative needs two things: a sense of internal logic, and a sense of identification with the protagonist. Nobody's going to read the book of Iraqis begging to be saved from the hell we've plunged them into, because it lacks both.
The thing about decentralizing a government is that inevitably the rule of law gets all, you know, decentralized. It's nice to have a plan to stabilize it back, in addition to your plan to fuck everything up and hope that you can kill everybody that goes crazy as a result, but not historically likely, because everybody goes crazy when you drive them crazy on purpose, and then your choices are either to kill everybody, or else cross your fingers and hope it goes away. Or, in the case of our invasion of Iraq, somehow both.
Nate promises the guy that he understands -- which he does -- and that order will be restored very soon -- which it won't. I wonder how you say, "I am assured of this" in Iraqi Arabic. I imagine it sounds a lot like "Screwby" in Iraqi Arabic, being that they're the exact same phrase.
Evan, Brad, Lovell and Nate hunker down in a very dangerous place that seems not so dangerous for a second and then goes all, "Psych!" There's a very long, very worthwhile setup involving them scattering one by one down this exposed alleyway to a safe haven, so like Nate goes, "Colbert! Go!" and Brad goes, "Bounding!" and runs down the alley with sniper fire coming down, and gets to the place and yells, "Set!" and then the person goes, etc., until there's just Evan and Nate, and Nate goes, "Reporter, you ready?" and Evan shits himself an adorable little bit and says, "...gnnnnrrrrrryes!" and then runs down the alleyway at right angles to himself, running serpentine. Which frankly is one of the funniest pieces in the book, but man, watching it happen is like the funniest thing ever. They watch him make his toddling way down the alley like a toddler on too much sugar after twenty minutes on the bouncy castle, finally arriving, with equivalent and identical WTF faces everywhere, like I'm sure even the sniper was like, "That's too adorably dorky to shoot at," and shrugging at them, high on adrenaline.
Brad: "Reporter, what the fuck was that?" Evan explains -- quite reasonably, never mind the heaving breath and general loss of facial control -- that much like Alan Arkin in The In-Laws, he was running evasively. To his credit, there's something in his demeanor that signals his essential understanding that this was a Captain America crazy-pants move and that he was just reaching back for the first movie he could think of that explained how you deal with this situation. Which... is the point of the show, and Captain America. We deal with things how movies told us to/we must never deal with things how movies told us to. "The time we come under fire," Lovell explains, "Run in a straight line. You'll live longer." Brad, of course, additionally mentions how this will facilitate Evan living "a full happy life of betraying us and others with your venal lies." And just like Brad, Nate smiles lovingly down, because that's the best shit they've seen in weeks.
While looking for a place to do some looting themselves, Manimal explains to Christeson and Q-Tip about how they're restricted to one patrol every three days: Charlie today, Bravo tomorrow, and then Alpha. There's a whole Lewis Carroll thing there but I already used up my Lewis Carroll points on another show. "How the fuck are we supposed to take over Baghdad on one patrol a day?" T, I think, explains that it's the usual Meesh issue: Battalion's one translator means only one way to deal with the urban environment. Where, you know, people are. One Meesh was enough when they were mostly fighting dudes and sand -- frankly, one was a little too many for yours truly -- but now that they're actually fucking up an entire city, Meesh is center stage.
They head into some random building and are greeted by some snotty fellow from Fourth saying they've already occupied the structure, and go ratfuck some other establishment. We haven't talked about ratfucking, but it's when you go through the sack of castoffs from the MREs looking for stuff you actually want. Like if my whole team hates jalapeno and cheese, you might ratfuck yourself into a whole grip of jalapeno and cheese. So "looting" becomes less of a liberal gloss on my part once they say that: they're looting. They're bored, down to one patrol every third day, wanting to fuck things up and steal things and generally express hate in new ways, and these guys got there first. Which is sad, most especially because these our guys are Recon guys, which mean they're a billion times more rapey and looty and scary than the rest, but also means that in the sadness of the problem lies the horrific brilliance of the solution.
To the hooting calls of "Ricky Recon, you have a nice day!" our guys go completely awesome fucking Mission Impossible, for the first time in seven episodes doing their actual fucking jobs, for completely non-job related reasons, and proceed to blow your mind. They scale up the side of a business building using apparently only their fingerprints and thoughts, running across a rooftop without touching it, jumping through the air as though they can fly onto an adjacent rooftop, then rappelling down the opposite side with ropes they seemingly produce from their Batman utility belts, then down through a window, then stealth-silent-deadly down a corridor without making a sound, and then busting down a door into an office. And with the possible exception of Holsey/Christeson/Redman (I think), none of whom we even know that well, these are the least cool ones. I mean...
What I mean is that I want a First Recon Marine for Christmas, and not necessarily in a gay way, but like in the way that I suddenly want a Swiss Army Knife that can make martinis and illegally download music directly into my brain, while smiting my enemies, without its heartrate rising in the slightest. This show would not even be slightly effing realistic if we'd seen them doing this shit they can actually do, you know what I mean? These fuckers are in the Matrix. That's why you join, that shit right there, and we barely saw it. Hats the hell off.
Chaffin laughs and sits down at the guy's desk. What guy? Who knows. Probably had a wife, some kids. Probably a useless fuck. Definitely this is a useless office, at this point. We're not here to fuck with these people's livelihood. Probably dead. Probably deserved it. "Bring in my big-legged secretary," Chaffin says, all R. Crumb-like, with glasses from his utility belt. "Now, right away. Send her in. And tell her to bring me a coffee. And a blowjob with extra slobber." Possibly Redman kills the guy's computer with extreme prejudice: "Shit, man! Fuck it! Captain America made me a war criminal anyway?" They all agree, not because this makes sense but because they are fucked up; particularly Manimal, who has some aggression to work out.
So like, war is good, right? I love war the same way I love America, which is overall and without exception, because Americans are Americans whether they look like you or talk like you or make the money you make. But this is kind of a microcosm here, and getting ever further from what war is about, because while the idea of war is good, nobody would do it on purpose. So you find people who can somehow find their way there, who somehow have the right chemical mix of Smart and Strong ... and Kill and Hate ... to feel okay about it. Or enough of one that the other ones don't matter. A+B+C+D=X, no matter what percentage of each as long as it equals out. And in this case you've got Manimal and Chaffin, whose issues are obvious, Q-Tip, whose issues are both more and less obvious, and some other Marines we don't know that well, bringing their personal shit to bear on somebody they've never met and will never care about. And that's war too.
Q-Tip, not wrong, but certainly on the nose if you've been watching the show at all: "This is like that holiday Dirty Earl is always talking about, the one where the working man gets to fuck the rich man's shit up!" Redman pisses on the couch, which they all pronounce heinous, and Manimal gets really violent with a wall, and then they decide to leave, and Christeson snags a painting off the wall. "Nice," somebody says. That would be Christeson, who stared gape-mouthed at the beauty of Q-Tip's painting of a hamlet, before it was destroyed. Stealing art, for no reason other than vandalism. This isn't war.
This is part of war: the trucks rolling through town, people running up alongside and behind, grinning and laughing, yelling through the windows: "America good! Saddam no good! No jobs! No good! No good! We have nothing to do but talk, play dominos, smoke! Saddam was an asshole!" Ray offers a guy a cigarette as he's declaiming very simply, "Life is very hard." The guy asks Ray for Valium, because he apparently can't sleep, and the conversation changes very swiftly. As usual, Ray keeps up and his whole demeanor changes -- this is one of his best scenes -- and he starts indulging and teasing the guy in a way only an American could understand. "Really? Why?" Oh, it's bad of course, and the liquor store was closed when the bombing been started, so please give the guy drugs. "Oh, that's horrible," laughs Ray. "I got some uppers if you want to party all night... Just uppers, no downers." The guy lights his cigarette and keeps asking for Valium; everybody's asking for Valium. And I mean, if ever there were a situation that called for a fucking Valium, it's Baghdad Spring '03.
Manimal grins at the girls bringing tea; Q-Tip and Christeson tink their glasses. Poke points out the women to Lilley: "Check it, bro. The men are all sitting around talking shit, and the women are all working." Lilley drops another smarmy patronizing Wire-like line about how if they were fighting the women instead of the men, they'd get their asses kicked. And in case you weren't under the impression that Iraqis are all women-hating faggots who let their bitches dig for food while they lay around sucking each other's cocks, some dude hits on Gabe, and Gabe tries to get Walt to shoot the guy, and Walt tells him everything's fine, and maybe if those two little scenes weren't so contiguous it wouldn't seem so gross, but there's something frisky fucking jingo about taking something as complicated as sexuality and the admittedly upsetting gender politics of the Middle East and crushing them together into some retarded base-level non-joke like that. Because God forbid dudes make out without it making some larger point about how some men are men and some men aren't men and the best way to figure that out is by seeing who acts more homophobic and thus more American and thus less deserving of murder. Some gunner blows Gabe a kiss. In the book, the guys thought it was hilarious, because they weren't characters in a show but actual guys, who thought it was funny; because what it is, is fucking funny. It's not 99% culture shock, 1% American values: it's 100% sensory overload, and dudes in the middle of a bombed-out piece of shit city that moments ago was one of the most beautiful cities on the planet trying to score some Marine ass is funny, because that's guys right there. Dumbshit scene. Play to the cheap seats and that's who shows up.
Nate stands with Brad and Lovell with a long list: "Unexploded munitions, lack of electricity, no running water, broken phone lines, ransacked hospitals, and bandits coming through at night, robbing homes. Oh, and they want jobs." Lovell, understandably, is like, "Is that all?" And not that life under Saddam was awesome, but: didn't they have those things a week ago? "Yeah, for now," says Nate, because there's a whole Maslow pyramid of shit people deserve for being people, and they mount up. Stiney watches them, chasing behind the trucks, laughing and smiling and waving: "That was cool."
Nate reads his notes at a CO meeting that night: "The phone lines are broken, the hospitals are ransacked, not to mention the fact they told me they get robbed by bandits at night. We should be out in these neighborhoods at night, when they need us." Encino Man says this is strictly no-go: "Battalion says there's too much heavy fighting going on at night for us to patrol." Um, yeah. Which is why they're there, and vice versa, so should they not maybe help fix the mess they made and continue to make? "Battalion thinks what we have to do is let this work itself out."
Encino Man starts reading, and by "reading" I mean "sounding out," more info from whatever piece of construction paper his mission propaganda notes are crayoned onto: "The ability of hostile forces in Baghdad to successfully and continually engage our forces will be complicated by the local Shi'as' intolerance for regime paramilitary forces hiding out in their neighborhoods." So we sit back sucking each others' cocks while they kill each other, is what you're saying. "Battalion says we don't go out at night. It's too dangerous. Godfather says the Shi'as will be doing our dirty work for us. If we go out after dark, the Shi'as might engage us." Encino Man nods, and then -- as usual -- remembers the entire thing he's there to say: "Tomorrow night we're billeted to the north of the city in a hospital complex." Nate's all about the neighborhood he was just talking about, you know, where the people are dying without phones or water, and Encino Man reminds him that this is not their mission. It's not their mission to help the people that exist, it's their mission to help the people that might exist and kill the people elsewhere who are just like both those prenominate kinds of people.
Hear about a house down the lane where the dad isn't so nice to his kids. Gets drunk, hits them, all kinds of shit. Has a pet dog that he might one day unleash on your kids. No proof of the dog, the whole neighborhood asking for proof you say, "I don't need proof. I have a gun." Knock down his door, burn down his kitchen. And the guy's a fucker, don't get me wrong. He hits his kids: bad. He's a drunk and a dick. But I don't see a dog. Whole neighborhood watching, saying, "Didn't you say there was a dog?" Fuck that, I have a gun, burn down the bathroom. Guy's long gone.
So now you've got 600,000 hungry kids in the house with no kitchen and no bathroom, and they're starting to hit each other because that's what they do, and wander out into the street with baseball bats and guns of their own. And who knows which ones think the dad was awesome and which ones were waiting for you to show up. And now you've got some ideas about what to do, but they don't seem to involve kitchens or bathrooms, and when you leave you better have a fucking plan.
If you're the sheriff, you're the sheriff all the time. Stewardship, not possession, is the meaning of power. So basically, you just invited them over. To live. If your gun is big enough to kill their house, it's big enough to feed and house them in peacetime. And even if you don't agree: either way, if they don't have kitchens or bathrooms, they're coming over to your house. And you'd better be fucking ready.
Nate's at the place, trying to smile, flipping through his phrasebook, avoiding their desperation, trying to appear both intimidating and not, at the same time. The American role on the global stage, destroyer and hero at once, is only realistic to Americans. But we try, one by one of us, the best and the worst of us, we try to be both at once: screwby. He's with a new guy, a random translator who appeared out of nowhere and offered his services. He tells Nate all they want are A) fresh water and B) statues of George Bush, to erect up and down the street in place of Saddam's, as soon as the Americans help them pump out the sewage. Evan laughs, because that's weird from like three directions at once. Translator explains to Nate: "They think Bush is a ruler like Saddam, they don't understand the idea of a president who maybe year will go out." And listen, if you can explain the difference between American foreign policy in the last forty years and straight up laissez-faire colonialism, start by explaining it to me. Then Viet Nam, then Afghanistan, then this guy. Every generation has warriors, but not every decade gets an honest war.
Brad watches the women dipping sewer water from the street. The barricades keep everyone from moving. Everyone is armed. Because the police stations and the armories have been emptied, an AK now costs the same as about two packages of cigarettes. Nate stares at the translator, Evan's eyes go wide. "Those from an outlying neighborhood have set up a mortar behind the mosque, and at night, they shoot mortars at random." The men start yelling about it, and Nate nods. "You've taken the country apart. You're not putting it back together. The violence that goes on at night, letting vigilantes and thieves out, will not correct the problems of Saddam's rule. All this... is a bomb. If it explodes, it will be bigger than the war."
And when it does, it will be. They will come to your house, like wolves at the door. And every time we play this out, every time we fuck up the endgame, as Charlie Wilson said, they will come calling. They're invited; if you take away a man's house, you offer your own. That golden ladder reaching down? It goes up, too. The problem wasn't American foresight of terrorist plans, because the thing about terrorist plans is that they exist only in the margins of the safeguards you set. It only ever happens at the edge of vision. Lock down the roads and they come by air, lock up the planes and they'll walk across the border: it's how terrorism works. It's why terrorism works. And we keep begging for it. Lots of good intentions, not a lot of follow-through: and we don't get it, and we keep doing it, because rhetoric aside we're not there for regime change: we're there to ratfuck. We're not looking at the people because they're just a distraction: that's at the edge of vision too.
Doc Bryan, looking more awesome than ever before, does wound care on a little girl, explaining again and again through pointing and repeating to a little boy about what to do . Brad can smell the cordite in the air, leftover from the night before. From every night before. Gunny reminds us of Battalion's official word, per Encino Man: "This is supposed to be the Shi'a removing the Fedayeen and the Sunnis that backed Saddam." Nate finally admits aloud that it's bullshit: "That's what they tell us in the briefings, but this is a hundred percent Shi'a neighborhood."
Tell me right now the difference between a Sunni and a Shi'ite Muslim. Tell me right now, right this second without recourse to Google, what a Ba'athist is. Show me where Iraq is on a map. Pin a fucking yellow ribbon on it.
"They asked me if it was possible, could we stay the night. I had to tell them no, we had orders. They asked for water. I told them we'd come back another day. But guess what, I just got word that we're gonna rebillet again, move from the hospital to some power plant further east. Chances are we'll patrol another neighborhood tomorrow, and then another one the day." Brad watches a little kid, hopping over ordnance in the street. "This is madness." The men begin rioting at the med tents, freaking Doc out. The random translator guy says they're still asking for Valium: "They say they have headaches, they cannot sleep." Doc tells them they can frequent-flier right up their own asses until they stop cutting in front of the kids, and the guys clear out. A boy weeps in his arms. Christopher calls from outside the tent, "Doc? I'm handing out candy to the sick kids outside. These dudes just come by and steal it from them. Grown fucking men!"
Now what kind of country is it, where the old men push to the front and feed on candy, and let their sons lay dying?
Doc shoves the men out of the tent and out of the way, crying out to Nate that he's being overrun. The men swamp Two One's Humvee as they drive away; Evan spots a poster of Saddam, with devil horns scrawled across his face, and Nate stares blankly from his truck. A riot follows after them.
Evan follows Meesh to the mosque, asking why he's not bringing Fick. Meesh explains that the Imam won't talk to soldiers, which is frankly appropriate, and Evan asks to come along. "Dude, you're a soldier," laughs Meesh, and Evan swears he's not. He doesn't have that privilege. "Where did Mr. Hussein go? I mean, wasn't he..." Meesh tells Evan, and who knows if it's true or where he heard it or what it means or if he made it up: "He disappeared. He was a Ba'athist agent sent to spy on you." You mean like an embedded reporter? At the door, Meesh is directed to a pew, where he takes off his shoes for the first time maybe in weeks; Evan follows suit and Meesh laughs at him. "Wait here, infidel." It's actually kinda charming, for once. He takes off his vest, and turns into anybody. Meesh and the Imam talk for a moment, until he gets nervous about Evan, and then they go into another room. He steps lightly. Evan watches men kneel in prayer.
Later, leaving: "He says he welcomes the Americans, as long as they don't expose the Iraqi people to any corrupting influences. I told him we would bring water down to distribute from the mosque. Also, I asked him for help with the crowd so that they don't go crazy." Too late. Plus this charming little tidbit: "He says that the Americans should hit them if they come too close. He says these people are used to being pushed around." Watching the Beijing Olympics has been really weird, because you have all these thoughts about the safety of people, the bald cab drivers, the complete lie that China thinks it's perpetrating, and the fact that we all stand around watching China tell these lies, and the whole time you can just feel the broken spirit, aching off the screen. How much does it take to break the heart of a nation? I'm asking as an American. How much does it take to sew it up again?
The beautiful prayers ring out across the city; the beautiful spires reach up, toward the light. Those that are left. "All week long, everywhere we go, people have been asking us for water," Nate complains. "We finally bring it to them, and nobody fucking wants it." The men stand and watch our Marines, unmoving. Meesh: "They are broadcasting that it's against Islam to help the Americans." Ray notes that it's pretty ungrateful, considering we went to the trouble of invading their country. Evan wonders again if the Imam was really all that into America Fuck Yeah, and Meesh swears the meet was "totally cool," dude, and then walks off with a cigarette. Ray is amused by his bullshit, at a whole new level of nihilistic irony. Gunny wonders WTF is actually going on, and Espera points out that, Meesh being not "that big" of an asshole by any means, still, one must wonder: "how did an elite unit like ours roll into this shit with only one guy who could fucking speak Arabic? I mean, what the fuck, sir?" It's like he came in a package with the non-operational trucks, guns, radios, and commanding officers. Nate doesn't have an answer. They watch Meesh smoke.
The trucks drive under a wildly dramatic arch: two hands, holding swords that cross over the road. When my rap album makes it big, that's the first thing I'm building, right at the entrance to my zoo. They set up a position to recon a park that the Fedayeen are using: "We're gonna be able to use night optics and set up an OP on the park. And come morning, we move in and sweep it for signs of hostile forces." Brad stands up: "Gentlemen, they finally gave us a night recon." Ray points out that, exciting as it is, that's kind of desperate. That night they watch the city, lit up once again, on their goggles. Mortars, bombs, the whole bit. Nate notes the weirdness of the traffic: "It's bizarre... All of them driving in and out of the city, like it's normal." It's almost like their lives aren't on hold or something, just because you're invading.
Encino Man calls in a mission for Nate: "Hey, uh, Godfather is saying it's time for us to be more aggressive. Suggest you send foot patrols out into the neighborhoods below. How copy?" More aggressive? "Godfather says it's time for us to increase our presence." Nate, who's actually got eyes on the area he's talking about, is not interested. "Sir, given the level of disorder in the city at this time, and given our lack of a cohesive mission, I'm gonna have my men remain in a defensive position until dawn, when we'll move on the park." Encino Man whines. "Hitman," he repeats, "Having assessed the situation from close observation, I'm gonna keep my men in a defensive posture until dawn. How copy." Whining. Nate drops the phone, ignoring him, and shakes his head. "They want me to be more aggressive. Send the men into this. For what? So I can come home with twenty-one men instead of twenty-two?" His voice is getting quieter and quieter. "For what?"
Brad looks up at him: the strength of him, and the worry, and the exhaustion and the youth. "I trust your judgment, sir." He looks at him, quietly, begging him to remember. Remember, you are right and we trust you. Remember, you are going to be okay long after this and there are more things in the world than the sword hanging over your head. There are your men. Remember, remember. "I can be wrong... A platoon commander's situational awareness doesn't extend very far..." Brad's not buying. "Far enough, sir." Nate remembers.
day, Encino Man bitches. It's not that interesting. "I'm talking about a lack of obedience to orders. Your job, Nate, is to execute whatever your Captain tells you to execute, and you don't." Nate points out that, except for the rare occasions when Encino Man was literally trying to kill his own men due to the extremity of his stupidity, he's actually carried shit out, and in any case he was there, present, assessing the situation, using his discretion as CO. Encino Man is pissed because Nate's been "questioning his orders" since Ar Rifa, but given that Nate is awesome, what that actually means is that Encino Man's been fucking up even more than usual since Ar Rifa, which is in fact what's happened.
Encino Man and Casey Kasem share a tiny little OMG makeout session about can you even believe that Nate Fick has the unmitigated gall to present himself as a responsible and rational man who carries out his duty, when here we stand unable to find our assholes with a map and a guide, and Casey Kasem pisses some bullshit about how "the Corps won't forget," which is like the dickless equivalent of saying your dad is going to beat me up. Except for how the whole thing is apparently Casey Kasems all the way up, which is sad for the command structure but even sadder for the art of war.
Ray wanders through another part of the city, carrying a lantern for a moment before tossing it against a wall at random. It's funny. Out in the courtyard, Brad stares down at a garden, or what used to be a garden. What used to be a cradle, a garden, and is now just a hole with rocks in it, surrounded by more rocks, with piles of rocks scattered around on the rocks, and a giant bomb in the middle of it. Brad sends Poke for a det kit, which Poke is not feeling: "Exactly what do you know about ordnance removal?" Ray mutters quietly in the background, "Jack and shit." Point being, Brad says quietly, kids play in this garden. Poke goes to get it, like everybody knew he would, grumbling. "This is some bullshit. Garden? What garden? A garden's supposed to have plants in it. This is bullshit..." He shoves things around in the truck, looking for it, and Trombley asks him what Brad's up to. "Trying to blow hisself up. Probably gonna blow us all up."
Brad does bomb things to the bomb as Ray lets out one last gasping babble, about how in the movies they have the bomb and then there's the red wire or the black wire and you're sweating your balls off, and how just like in the movies, that's what is happening right this second. "Who thought we'd be doing this shit?" Brad tells him to shut up, and they all head around the corner so they don't get blown up along with the bomb. The Marines, predictably, go nuts about how awesome it is when you blow up a bomb, and Brad asks Poke if he feels better. "Like this solves anything." Brad points out that there's one less bomb in the garden now. It sounds like bullshit, or small potatoes, or a consolation prize, but at this stage it's not. It's the entire point.
Espera relates a story to Brad about these newly arrived grunts who slaughtered some Iraqi kids who were playing on blown tanks. "They were playing on top of the tanks," Lilley explains, "So the ROE said they were technically armed. General Mattis, he's on the radio saying this was the worst thing in the war so far." Brad has had it. His voice gets louder and louder: "They're screwing this up. Fucking idiots. Don't they fucking realize the world already hates us?" Espera watches Iceman crack; Meesh runs up to report another bomb, to some guy's house, and Brad gets ready to fix it. One less bomb in the garden.
"Hey Dog, you know when I was gonna write a book about my life as a repo man in LA, you know what I was gonna call it? Nobody Gives A Fuck. That's right, nobody does. You know the ideal place and time to repo a car? Crowded parking lot, mid-afternoon. You can jump in the car, drive that bitch off with the car alarm blaring, nobody's gonna stop you. Nobody's even gonna look at you. Know why? Nobody gives a fuck. In my line of work, that was key to everything." Brad, down in the pit once again, gives a fuck: "We kill civilians, we're gonna waste this fucking victory. We can't keep doing this." Espera tells him to relax, reminds him he's the Iceman: "The only thing we gotta worry about here are fucking do-gooders. Luckily there's not too many of those."
Nate arrives, just in case somebody's attempting to give a fuck, and after a struggle he talks Brad out of the hole: "I will not let you blow yourself up trying to maintain property values in Baghdad. That's a no-go." Everybody tries to remember not to give a fuck while staring wildly at everybody else, because Brad really wants to actually do something, and Nate's afraid of what might happen if he does. Gunny Wynn sounds the order again, and Nate stares right at him: "Get out of the hole. We're done here, Brad." Brad is still giving a fuck and it is tearing him up; Nate is giving a fuck and it's killing him. The entire point of war is good men doing good things that nobody else can do. So if the best men among them are coming up against this like an allergy, doing everything they don't want to do and cockblocked from doing the actual good they should be doing, what does that tell you about the quality of the war itself?
Ray and I think Manimal stand on a football field, trying to buy hooch from some Iraqi dude, arguing about how the secret to great porn is that you never see the guys' faces, but then what if he's eating her out, then you have to look at his face. Because, I'm not entirely clear on this, but I understand that the face area is an essential part of cunnilingus. Somebody asks what kind of gin it is, just as Nate's walking by: "Kind that doesn't come out when there are officers or senior NCOs present," he gruffs, making Ray laugh. Somebody explains to Q-Tip that they're racking out in Saddam's kid's soccer stadium: "He'd torture them if they'd lose." Dirty allows as how probably this made them good players, and Ray talks about how it's their last night in Baghdad, sipping his gin: "LT's just got to hand in his write-up, so Ferrando can get all the medals and streamers lined up for Battalion. And I heard Eckloff saying that we're moving to a base just south of the city tomorrow." They take that in. I like the guy playing Eckloff but I wish we'd gotten to see more of him being a dick, because not even Eckloff makes Godfather okay.
Dirty Earl does some shitty acting, but can't blame it on the dialogue: "Shit, back home on the news I'll bet you they're talking about what heroes we all are now. Reality is we're the kids other parents told their kids not to hang with in high school." Somebody tells the kung-fuing Rudy to put a shirt on, and Dirty keeps up the horrible line reading, which is so apocalyptically bad that Lilley must tape it: "You know what I'd like to see? A couple of them college kids from an MTV beach party drop into Iraq. They could see what being a hero is really like. The first time they'd see what it was like not to have control over their fucking lives. Second thought, scratch that. Middle-class college kids out here will get us all killed."
Q-Tip is all, "Yo, what I'd like to see? Shit, I've seen 203 rounds go into windows and through a door one time. What I wish I seen? A grenade go up in someone's body and just... Boom. Blow that shit up." It's filmed just as disgusting as it sounds, with his eyes all stupid and hungry and angry and nasty, and Espera being grossed out while Q-Tip licks his lips at the thought. Of seeing a grenade explode a human being's body, from the inside out. Evan talks about this moment -- without naming the Marine in question -- as a kind of sickening moment where everybody was simultaneously appalled at him saying it out loud. Of all the different movies you can be in, that's one you share only with Captain America. Everybody else talks about warrior spirit and killing all the time, getting horny when you're shot at, but this is not the movie they're in.
Lilley videotapes a guy up in the stands who gets his gun caught in a fence and, yanking on it, manages to fall down and roll around for awhile. They all act like it's hilarious and slapstick, but it's not visually that stimulating or funny, it's just this guy being awkward and everybody else laughing really hard like they saw something funnier than we did. A guy gets meaningful as Q-Tip looks up at the sky and Ray gets even quieter, I guess because they still had twenty awesome speeches on index cards scattered around some office somewhere that hadn't made it into any other episode. "You know the military can fuck up anything. They can even make going to the beach suck. But one thing that ain't overrated is combat. You take rounds, you shoot back, shit starts blowing up... Fucking sensory overload."
"That was cool," Ray says as they leave Baghdad. "Who do we invade now?" Brad knows it's not over. "We don't even know what we've started. We may be here all summer long." Espera gives a speech about how, in terms of the actual mission this force was tasked with, we just watched them be awesome: "Twenty-one days. Twenty-one days to take down an entire country. You gotta give the white man his props." truck back they're singing "Come Sail Away," and behind that there's Nate listening to them. Listening to Styx, washing up against the shore. Later, Evan and Espera have another awkwardly shoehorned-in conversation about Poke's wife. "My wife, man, she's smart, but... she fucked up when she married me. I was a piece of shit. I remember the first time I met her, she told me about all the books that she had read. Dog, it hit me. There's a whole world that I missed. Before I met her, I used to think: I got a shit load of hand skills, welding, pipefitting, repoing cars. Any pussy can read a book. See, I didn't... I didn't grow up with no understanding. My mom tried, but... but my dad, he was this... he was a psycho ex-Marine Vietnam vet. ...He won a Bronze Star. Shit, I wish I had his warrior skills. But... he left us. Left after his fucking jealous bitch of a girlfriend shot his ass in my mom's house. One day my old man, he tries to patch things up with me. He's gonna take me fishing. Except on the way to the lake, he takes us to this porn shop so he can have a jack in the booths. Leaves me outside in the parking lot. Where this... old fruit tries to cruise me. I threw a fucking brick through that fool's windshield. That was our father-son trip."
Evan nods, like that has nothing to do with anything, because in fact it has nothing to do with anything, it's just a very moving scene from the book that needed to be in the show, and this is where it landed, and then part two of the same scene, which Jon Huertas manages to cock up unbelievably: "Hey, Dog, listen to this. I've learned there's two types of people in Iraq: those who are very good, and those who are dead. I'm very good. I've lost twenty pounds, shaved my head, started smoking, my feet have half rotted off and I move from filthy hole to filthy hole every night. I see dead children and people everywhere, and function in a void of indifference. I keep you and our daughter locked away deep inside, and I try not to look there. Dog, you think that's too harsh?" Evan laughs and says he thinks too much. Which is true, but you wouldn't know it from that performance. Which sucks, because that part really stuck with me and I wish it had been more respected in the show than to just be awkwardly tacked on while everybody's getting their last-minute heartaching speechifying on simultaneously across the entire MEF.
Encino Man calls Patterson out on a totally bullshit mission, escorting some engineers to chemlight a minefield. In the middle of the night. Just in case, you know, it were to suddenly present a threat in the middle of the night when they're not moving. Patterson's like, straight up, "Roger that. Now you copy this, Major. My men are not carrying out that mission. This is a no-go." Encino Man lumbers back to the beginning of the orders and starts repeating them again, and Patterson drops the phone. Eventually Encino Man figures it out, and of course he calls up Captain America immediately, and of course Captain America just about barfs with excitement and volunteers before fucking Swamp Thing can even sound out the first word.
In the truck with the guys, Kocher is forced to admit that yes, they were the ones that were suspended for trying to bayonet a prisoner, but like, they actually weren't, and they got exonerated: "The Captain was trying to bayonet the prisoner. I hear he's getting a medal for it. Same goofus who's got us all out here at night trying to mark a minefield." The guy makes this hilarious face like Eric just told him the story of the Golden Arm. They watch the guys walk across the minefield, and Dirty notes that they weren't actually supposed to go into the field, but just toss chemlights from the road. One of them blows up, of course, and then the other one, so they're all screaming and bleeding and shit, and Captain America drools for awhile, and Eric takes care of fucking everything as usual and bandages and tourniquets the guys while spinning plates on his head, and gets them into the truck, and I think one of them managed to lose an eye or something, and Captain America is still drooling, and finally they get moving, and Captain America's yelling to give him morphine, and Eric tells him that's not happening because he's nowhere near stabilized but Captain America doesn't get why because Captain America heard the word "morphine" in a movie one time, and then he randomly starts screaming about how they have to take this shortcut he may or may not have made up in his stupid fucking mind, and of course they drive into a ditch, and Eric saves the day once again and takes care of the guys, and whatever. Captain America sucks, did you know that? Now you do.
day, Walt is not enjoying inventorying their ammo, but Brad's happy to be doing something. They hear gunshots and Brad tells them they're shooting wild dogs that get too close to the camp shitters. "See, Sergeant? We do shoot dogs in Iraq," Trombley says with a shit-eating grin, and quite deliberately opens up a package of Charms and pops one in his mouth, offering another to Brad, who smiles. Just then a wild dog appears, reaches down Trombley's throat with one giant doggy fist and pulls out his insides, and then Trombley becomes somehow even more two-dimensional, and then he can never again get on your nerves because he's dead. Lucky, lucky Charms.
Chaffin is expansive as Nate walks by: "Ratfucked a blown hajji tank. I can't believe I'm getting paid to dip, work out and hang out with the best guys in the world!" Yeah, buddy? Because I'm kind of tired of most of you at this point. Nate tells Trombley that one of the guys from last night lost an eye and the other one a leg below the knee. Brad asks the obvious followup question, which is whether anybody's figured out why they were on a mission that should never have happened and which one Company had already refused, but Nate's not playing. "Oh," he says as he's leaving. "This war has an official name now: Operation Iraqi Freedom." Somebody gives a hoo-rah from deep in that not-giving-a-fuck area near their sternum near the diaphragm.
"I don't miss anything from home. The only exception is my bike. I miss that. Speed, solitude and no one can touch me." I love Brad Colbert. I wish he would go home and ride his bike. Ray stares into space, quiet and sad and very very small. "Hey. Where the fuck did you go? You haven't said two words since Baghdad." Ray shrugs: "No more Ripped Fuel." His mouth looks quieter, smaller. He has turned into somebody else. "Man... It seems no matter where we go as Marines, it's always some fucking shithole..." Evan arrives with his bags to say goodbye, looking for something. They look blankly back at him, and he finally says goodbye. Ray smiles and nods, softly, but he keeps standing there. They stare at him. "Uh. Thanks," he says, very seriously, for a lot of reasons, and Brad hears that. "Stay frosty," he says, and smiles. Brad watches Evan leave as Espera arrives, inviting them to a football game with Alpha, and tiny Ray stands up. "Back among the living?" asks Brad, and smiles to himself.
Evan meets with Godfather at Battalion; he smiles easily, because he has no idea what Evan's seen, or just how much smarter Evan is. "So what'd you see, reporter?" Evan chuckles quietly. "No other military in the world can do what we do. The Marines are America's shock troops. Is there anything you want to ask me before you unhitch your wagon?" Yeah, I've got some motherfucking questions. Starting with: "Captain Americ... Captain McGraw," he corrects himself with a laser bolt from Ferrando's eyeballs, "Sir." Godfather nods, and attempts to do his usual gift-of-gab thing: "All right now, he walked a fine line, okay, but in the end, he was within the box of acceptable behavior. But in my mind, when you allow that behavior to progress, you end up with a My Lai." (Evan: Word, exactly.) "You think I should have taken harsher action." Evan kind of disbelievingly brings up the two separate attempts at bayoneting a person, and Godfather is like, easy one: "But no Iraqi prisoners actually wounded. All right, now I wasn't there to see what happened and I have conflicting reports from those who were." (Evan can agree with that.) "But we're in a war zone, reporter." (True.) "And if I expect my subordinates to remain effective in combat, then I have to show them trust... Until it's proven to me beyond any doubt that they are undeserving of that trust."
(Um, okay, but way weaker. So you're saying it's okay to act like a total fuck-up and no matter how many times people tell you this, you have to actually engineer a hindsight issue? Because this is Godfather, and you know that once that happens he can't censure the person, because it reflects poorly on him as their CO in the first place. "Godfather didn't believe the fifteen reports that Captain McGraw was a pants-shitting lunatic from all manner of high-functioning, intelligent grown-ass men, but once Captain McGraw pulled down his pants and literally pissed on Godfather's leg, Gentlemen, Godfather knew that this was not in any way Godfather's fault, either strategically or in execution. What would General Mattis do, you might ask, as Godfather often does, and that is indeed what Godfather had to ask himself. And what Godfather realized was that Godfather always meant for Captain America to piss on Godfather's leg, because Godfather knew that this was exactly what the enemy was not expecting, in terms of the A-O of Godfather's leg getting pissed on, and Godfather was pleased to report to General Mattis that Operation Godfather's Leg Getting Pissed On By A Roaring Retard was a complete success, with zero casualties.")
"Now the same support I extend to Captain McGraw is extended to all my officers. Lieutenant Fick, for example." (Oh for Christ's sake, is basically where Evan starts heading at this point.) "I'm sure you're aware there's some in this Battalion who feel that Lieutenant Fick is unfit for command." Evan laughs, because well yeah, when you've got four people in the entire Platoon actually closing the loop and attempting to correct for their idiot superiors, those generally will be the four people you hear about from said superiors: "You should consider your sources, Sir."
"So what happens to my command if I respond to every complaint made against one of my men?" Evan nods sadly, because we are motherfucking done here. "It's a terrible feeling to be the man sending other people into combat. Terrible feeling." Evan wonders what the fuck that has to do with anything they were just talking about, and maybe Godfather's just had a stroke or given in to senile dementia or something, because what? Evan shakes his hand and gets the fuck out of there, and Godfather fully yells at him as he's leaving, "But something else I'm struggling with... is the excitement I felt. Getting shot at." (WTF?) "It's just something I hadn't anticipated about war. Did you?" Evan searches for the words to describe on just how many levels Godfather can take his faulty fucking reasoning and weird fetishism and ass-covering double-talk and shove them where only Mattis has gone before, but gives up and grabs his bags because what's the point? Godfather watches him leave and nods to himself, like, "Good one." Fucking idiot.
Encino Man is, of course, putting himself center stage at the football game, screaming and shouting unendingly, and calling all kinds of orders at such a rate you might think he's not a dunderheaded moron, and some kind of football thing happens which would appear to be beneficial to the team or side of which he is a member, and he engages in some light shit-talking, and then more football business happens, and he shit-talks some more, and finally Patterson has just had it, and jumps the fuck on him and starts whaling on him, and they pull him off after a while -- not hardly long enough by my count -- and Encino Man is like, "Wha happen?" and then more football and then the same thing happens only out of the blue, with Ray randomly freaking out on Rudy and taking him out with a leg tackle and getting his teenage dirtbag ass soundly beaten by Rudy, and the whole time he's screaming about what an asshole Rudy is and they get them away from each other, and Ray's going off about how Rudy's a "fucking PTSD psycho" and "just like every other jock piece of shit in high school," and I mean, all of this adds up to Ray's personal shit that is not our business in any way. He walks off, really crying now, and one of the Marines thinks about how maybe having highly trained killers playing an aggressive game like football isn't the best idea, and Rudy is crying out to Ray to come back, sadly, calling him brother, and Brad appears out of nowhere, and Ray won't hear anything, and somebody tells Rudy to go to his little quiet place and chant, motherfucker, and the sun is setting, and it is beautiful, but just because there aren't any guns firing doesn't mean the war is over, because if the war was ever over, for any of them, they'd leave and never come back.
Everybody's running around a warehouse acting wild that night, and Sixta's all, "Y'all gets a free pass on the hooch tonight, but tomorry y'all tighten up your assholes," and I must say, as much as I will miss seeing Brad and Ray and Nate every week, it's about fifty-fifty with his horrible ass and having to hear him talk. That shit is like nails made of vomit on a chalkboard made of crying Wal-mart babies. Lilley wants to believe that things are better now than they were under Saddam, and Doc points out that Iraq was fucked before we got there, and it's fucked now: "I personally don't believe we liberated the Iraqis." Lilley is not happy. "Only time will tell." Espera thinks back to the roadblock in Al Hayy (that was the first one, where the truck flipped over and the guys climbed out one at a time) and wonders if those were bad guys. Nate shakes his head. "Could have been a truckload of babies. With the rules of engagement, you did the right thing."
What on earth would a truckload of babies be doing driving into a USMC roadblock north of Al Hayy, Iraq, in the middle of the night? If not evil?
"Priest told me it's not a sin to kill if you don't enjoy killing. My question is whether indifference is the same as enjoyment." Oh, shut up, Espera. My God. You're so deep? Here's a dictionary. Turns out "indifference" and "enjoyment" are completely different concepts. We get the point you're making, which is that drama can happen at any time, even when everybody is too tired to indulge you. Write a fucking poem or something. Brad happily noshes down on some jalapeno cheese on crackers: "All religious stuff aside, the fact is people who can't kill will always be subject to those who can." And those who can, apparently, will also always find a way to make it all about them, even as they're claiming this life-changing indifference to it all.
But if not ourselves, what shall we contemplate? Lilley comes running in with his video, which is creepily spliced with actual footage shot by somebody or another, and they all gather around, and Johnny Cash starts singing about the apocalypse, and the video is very long and very horrible, all grinning faces and air-humping and occasional blown-apart bodies, in case you ever wanted to revisit those images, and everybody's hooting and hollering. Off to the side, Nate and Brad watch a moment, and then Nate nods goodbye to Brad. Gunny follows. Ray arrives with two coffees, one for Brad, and a gun in his other hand. Brad tries to get Ray's attention, but his eyes slide away, and he joins the others.
Onscreen, Brad is flying. He walks out of the room, deaf to their hoots as they call after him. He would never associate with these people, normally. Rudy laughs at the screen, and Lovell leaves the room. Espera soon follows. Q-Tip leaves, dragging Christeson after. Gabe sucks down some vodka and hands it to Chaffin, who takes off. Manimal leaves during the montage of porn mags on the walls of every surface; Rudy follows, shoving Ray lovingly as he goes. They leave the room in a serpentine manner. Ray stands to Trombley, but doesn't leave until an explosion lights his face up and he turns to Ray excitedly, speaking in an adoring hush: "That's fucking beautiful!" That's all it takes for Ray, who leaves him, still getting off. Lilley looks down at what he made, and leaves. The smile falls from Trombley's face, and he stares at the screen intensely: him, killing. The world burning. Him, left behind, watching the screen.
Fifty or sixty species of cuckoo are brood parasites, meaning they lay their eggs in other birds' nests. That's where "cuckold" came from. The European Common Cuckoo's egg hatches earlier than the host's, and the chick grows faster. It pushes the other chicks or eggs out of the nest; the mothers never notice, because all they see is the chick's mouth, open and hungry. And the chicks grow, to lay eggs that will grow in nests, and so on. Imagine looking down at your child's face and realizing it was put there by somebody else. Doesn't happen. We don't have an equivalent. Trombley's not the apocalypse, and he's not a killing machine. He's somebody's son. They all are. In every war that's ever happened, and there's always one somewhere: they are your sons and daughters.
Generation Kill is a misnomer, as well as an oxymoron. It puts all that pain and fear somewhere in the same place as video games and rap lyrics and downloading music: what the kids are up to these days is killing. Except they're not cuckoos, because we all came from somewhere: Trombley was failed. In the exact same way as Baghdad, and Afghanistan before that. Before he ever left. And they are coming home. That's not a horror movie, it's a fucking tragedy, and it started right here. In the cradle; in the nest. In the garden.
As long as we can point to the bad guys -- even when they're our own children -- we can be safe in the knowledge that they're not us. We can say we won the war, whatever the war happens to be, and we can say we live in peace, for a little while. Until they come and find us again. We can say we're substantially different from them, and that can be enough, which is how war happens in the first place, and peace too. But if that peace is just a lie we tell ourselves, so we can shut the book and go back to our lives, if that peace rests on the backs and bodies of people you won't even recognize as your own, then war will always be the motherfucking answer.